In the last issue of spacesofidentity.net,
Alexander Greenawalt presented an interesting analysis of the processes involved
in the transformation of Serb collective memory. I was particularly intrigued
by his brief assessment of the role that Montenegrin ruler and poet Petar
Petrovic Njegos (1813-1851) and his literary endeavors played in this process.
Greenawalt’s analysis of the poem The
Mountain Wreath prompted me to re-read it and other parts of Njegos’s
oeuvre. The following text is not intended as the starting point for a debate
but should be read as an attempt to clarify several important issues related
to Njegos’s literary work. Even though I am acutely (and painfully)
aware that this short article cannot do justice to the multi-layered character
of Njegos’s magnum opus, I find it necessary to address a common practice
of misreading and misinterpreting his literary work. The following text deals
not only with aspects of Alexander Greenawalt’s reading of The
Mountain Wreath but also with the manner in which Njegos’s literary
work has been interpreted by other South Slav specialists.

Metropolitan Petar II Petrovic Njegos, the nineteenth-century ruler of Montenegro,
and his poetic endeavors occupy central stage in the South Slavic myth-making
factory. Njegos’s magnum opus is his epic poem The
Mountain Wreath, written in 1846 in Cetinje and published in February
1847 in Vienna. Segments of the original manuscript containing only 1528 verses
were found in 1889 in the Viennese National Library. The first edition of
the poem does not correspond entirely to the original manuscript.[1]
The poem appeared in print in the same year as Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic’s
translation of the New Testament.
According to Professor Vasa D. Mihailovic, whose English translation of The
Mountain Wreath was published in 1997 in Belgrade by Serbian Europe
Publishing, Njegos “is revered as Montenegro’s most illustrious
son and the greatest poet in Serbian literature.”[2]

The Mountain Wreath is set in eighteenth-century
Montenegro and deals with the attempts of Njegos’s ancestor, Metropolitan
Danilo, to regulate relations among the region’s warring tribes. Njegos
constructed his poem around a single event that allegedly took place on a
particular Christmas Day in the early 1700s, during Metropolitan
Danilo’s rule: the mass execution
of Montenegrins who had converted to Islam. The dating of the alleged
event is a matter of some controversy. In the subtitle to The
Mountain Wreath, its author tells us that the poem deals with a “Historical
Event from the End of the Seventeenth Century” (“Historicesko
Sobitie pri Svrsetku XVII vieka”).[3]
The dating of the event as described in The
Mountain Wreath appeared in a number of histories of Montenegro published
during the nineteenth century, such as those by Sima Milutinovic Sarajlija
(1835) and Dimitrije Milakovic (1856). Later studies of The
Mountain Wreath by Milan Resetar (1890), Ilarion Ruvarac (1899), and
Lj. Stojanovic (1903) based their dating of the event on a note allegedly
written by the Metropolitan Danilo Petrovic himself. The note and its commentary
by N. Musulin were published in Glasnik,
XVII (1836).[4]
It is worth pointing out that Ilarion Ruvarac expressed serious doubts regarding
the genuine character of the note and that his concerns were quickly brushed
aside by a number of local historians. The aforementioned authors offered
three different dates for the “Christmas Day Massacre” (1702,
1704, and 1707), while The Mountain Wreath
positioned the event in the late eighteenth century. It is interesting to
note that in his earlier works Njegos dated the alleged event in 1702. In
his poem Ogledalo Srpsko, Njegos
wrote about the “slaying of the converts” and positioned it “around
the year 1702.”[5]
A notable exception was Konstantin Jiricek, who, in his Naucni
Slovnik, stated that the event as described in The
Mountain Wreath never took place. But despite the controversies regarding
the historical bases for the story about the “slaying of the converts”
in Montenegro, the recently published History
of Montenegro (Litera, Belgrade) tells us that:

At the dawn of the eighteenth century, in 1707, an event occurred in Montenegro,
known as the liquidation of the converts to Islam (Islamicized Christians).
Its initiator was Bishop Danilo Scepcevic (later Petrovic). The event itself
was highly localized in character (it happened in the clan of the Ceklici)
but, from the historical point of view, it marked the beginning of a process,
which would continue throughout the eighteenth century and end with the disappearance
of converts.[6]

Regarding the claim about “the disappearance of converts,” suffice
it to say that, at present, some 16% of the Montenegrin population is of the
Islamic faith and that Montenegrins of the Islamic faith have been constantly
present in the region. Naturally, one should not overlook the demographic
changes that have occurred in Montenegro over the past couple of centuries,
but these movements of population can hardly amount to “the disappearance
of converts.” Moreover, Montenegrins of the Islamic faith and their
socio-cultural heritage have been in the past and are at present an integral
part of the general matrix of Montenegrin society.

Regardless of their political agendas, ideological preferences or religious
persuasions, every new generation of South Slav historians and politicians
appropriates Njegos’s work hoping to find enough quotations to validate
their own views. In every translation of The
Mountain Wreath in English, one can detect attempts to remodel the
original. The latest English version by Professor Vasa D. Mihailovic is simply
another attempt to colonize Njegos’s work for the sake of aiding modern
political and ideological struggle in the Balkans. For example, Professor
Mihailovic translated the word pleme
(tribe) with the English word nation,
thus, ascribing to Njegos terminology he never used in The
Mountain Wreath:

By using the term nation instead
of tribe, Professor Mihailovic attempted
to alter the semantics of the poem, alluding to the existence of a direct
link between Njegos’s work and the issue of a Serb identity among Montenegrins.
He also implied that Njegos thought in national terms. In turn, such an implication
reaffirms typical readings of The Mountain
Wreath conditioned by the ideological confines of the Serb national
paradigm.

The Mountain Wreath has been the
subject of praise and criticism; it has been used to support diametrically
opposing views. Serbian nationalists use it as historical justification in
their attempt to keep alive their dream of a Greater Serbia. Croatian nationalists
recognize in Njegos’s poetry the ultimate statement of the Oriental
nature of South Slavs living east of the Drina river, thus reinforcing the
popular notion of a stereotypical other.
Islamic radicals view The Mountain Wreath
as a manual for ethnic cleansing and fratricidal murder, as a text whose ideas
were brought back to life during the most recent nationalistic danse
macabre in the former Yugoslavia. Montenegrin independentists largely
shy away from any interpretation of Njegos’s poetry, and only on occasion
discuss its literary and linguistic merits.
My reading of The Mountain Wreath
is somewhat different. Naturally, this poem by Njegos can be read in different
ways. However, I believe that despite the openness of this work to various
interpretations (or precisely because of it), one should not forget the fact
that what one is reading is a work of literature. I would like to propose
reading Njegos’s The Mountain Wreath
as the tale of a long-gone heroic tribal society that was poeticized in order
to depict the state of affairs in Njegos’s Montenegro. With this in
mind, I believe that his work can be approached as an additional source for
assessing the conditions within a particular time frame in Montenegrin history,
that is Njegos’s time: the first half of the nineteenth century. The
long-gone Montenegro that Njegos wrote about had little in common with the
Montenegro of his time, and has nothing in common with contemporary Montenegro.
However, The Mountain Wreath does
speak volumes about political, social, cultural and economic conditions in
Montenegro during the early nineteenth century, and about Njegos’s efforts
to advocate the ideas of pan-Slavism and the Illyrian Movement.[8]

Despite the difficulty of proving that an event of such magnitude and in
such a manner as described by Njegos – the
killing of Montenegrins who had converted to Islam – ever took
place in Montenegro, the prevailing attitude is to approach Njegos’s
poem as a somewhat poeticized version of a historical event of this kind.
A lack of historical sources has not prevented the misreading and misuse of
Njegos’s poetry. One comes across statements that claim intimate knowledge
of the Metropolitan’s private thoughts and that emphasize Njegos’s
personal animosity towards Islam: “By
unleashing his wrath against the indigenous Slavic Muslims, Njegos displays
his personal hatred of Islam.”[9]
The fact that the victims in The Mountain
Wreath are depicted as convertsto Islam is not taken as a reflection
upon the socio-political conditions in Montenegro during Njegos’s time,
but as an easy explanation for those who believe that a deeply embedded hatred
towards Islam exists in Njegos and in Montenegro. In Njegos’s work we
cannot find an instance that would indicate his personal hatred towards any
group of people or towards any religion. Njegos did not hate the Turks as
a nation or the religion of Islam, and he did not hate individuals in Montenegro
who converted to Islam. On the contrary, he managed to find rather sophisticated
ways of euphemizing the fact of the conversion to Islam: attributing it to
the difficult historical circumstances and harsh living conditions in Montenegro.
It is almost as though he were absolving the converts of their guilt by saying:

Njegos is angry because, together with other Montenegrins, he is forced to
wage a constant battle for the survival of the Montenegrin state, its freedom,
its traditions and culture against a much stronger opponent. He generally
condemns the urge to conquer others, regardless of whether other groups (in
this case, the Ottomans) practice such methods. For him, the Islamization
of Montenegrins represents the initial stage in the process of dissolving
the traditional socio-cultural values that are so typical for Montenegro,
and he condemns the converts for not being conscious of that fact. Of course,
one could talk about Njegos, the politician, who fought against Ottoman rule
all his life, but this struggle should not be taken as a hatred
of Islam. Njegos’s correspondence with neighboring Ottoman officials
shows that the Metropolitan displayed a surprisingly relaxed attitude towards
his political and military enemies.[11]

The late Professor Edward Dennis Goy, a scholar at Cambridge University and
the author of The Sabre and The Song: Njegos’
The Mountain Wreath, took an interesting approach in analyzing segments
of this poem. One example is particularly revealing. In The
Mountain Wreath, Njegos described the following episode:

Professor Goy interprets this episode, in which Ruza, the wife of Kasan,
(both of the Eastern Orthodox faith) left her husband to run away with Mujo
Alic, a convert to Islam, as a kidnapping, and goes on to explain that this
type of event was a common criminal practice associated with Islamicized Montenegrins
of the period. Moreover, Professor Goy then projects this negative stereotyping
forward through time in order to reach the startling conclusion that: “When
one considers modern Islam and its taking of hostages and murder, one may
wonder whether it is not a characteristic of the faith.”[13]
The fact that one often finds accounts of the hostage-taking of Muslim women
by Orthodox Christian outlaws (Hajduks)[14]
and their conversion to the Christian faith (usually depicted by the following
verse: “From Hajkuna he makes Andjelija”
/ “Od Hajkune pravi Andjeliju”)
in both Serbian and Montenegrin epic poetry does not figure at all in Goy’s
analysis. After reading these and other similar statements about Njegos’s
poetry, I am convinced that this dead poet has few readers, and that misunderstandings
more often than not spring out from every word of his verse. Despite the persistent
return of many scholars to Njegos’s writing, it seems that his epic
poem The Mountain Wreath still remains
unread as literature. Moreover, available sources indicate that the episode
about Ruza Kasanova and Mujo Alic described in The
Mountain Wreath might be yet another example of Njegos reshaping a
segment of a mythologized past that was preserved in the popular memory.[15]

The myth of the slaying of the infidels
in early eighteenth-century Montenegro is a recurring theme in almost all
analyses of the region’s history and the mentality of its people. Its
usage as the ultimate explanation for the recent historical developments in
the region is apparent and particularly troubling.
The most significant source related to this popular myth in Montenegrin history
is The Book of Medojevina, an account
of church property in Cetinje that is part of the larger collection of documents
known as The Cetinje Chronicle.[16]The Book of Medojevina consists of
two documents – sworn statements by Petar and Vukosav Medojevic. The
first statement is dated April 25, 1733, in the Cetinje Monastery, while the
second statement was written fifteen years later, in 1748. Both documents
deal with an earlier conflict over a large property that the Medojevics, an
old Montenegrin Eastern Orthodox family, whose members had worked as blacksmiths
for the Cetinje Monastery since 1485, had had with the Church authorities.
According to the documents, during the rule of Metropolitan Danilo, the family
had refused to vacate the property and return it to the Church, in spite of
the loud objections of local priests, tribal leaders, and the Metropolitan.
The conflict escalated to the point that leaders of various Montenegrin tribes
gathered in Cetinje to discuss a course of action. Even though Metropolitan
Danilo half-heartedly tried to defuse the dangerous situation, a number of
Montenegrins went on to destroy the Medojevics’ houses and burn all
their possessions. Tribal leaders decided to expel the family. However, the
Medojevics refused to leave and resettled on the same property once again,
in spite of the collective decision on the part of the tribal leaders to expel
them from Cetinje and in spite of a curse put upon them by the Metropolitan
himself. Both documents tell us that in the course of the next decade, the
Medojevics, who had previously been a large family, dwindled to only two adult
members. Both documents also mention childless wives in the family. Pero and
Vukosav Medojevic then decided to seek forgiveness from the Metropolitan and
ask him to lift the curse. And they gave back the property to the Cetinje
Monastery.

In essence, both documents depict a conflict between the ruler of Montenegro
and the Medojevics, which spiraled out of control and, in time, became an
important segment of local tradition. The Montenegrin oral tradition reshaped
and redefined this conflict between the ruler and his subordinates into the
myth of the killing of converts.
This was accomplished by resorting to the notion of guilt
by imagined association. Namely, the popular oral tradition connected
the conflict between the Medojevics and the Metropolitan from 1704 to the
case of a number of Montenegrins who were, together with Stanisa Crnojevic,
forcefully converted to Islam in 1485.[17]
In time, the popular memory positioned the confrontation over the property
from 1704 in the same category as the imagined conflict between the Orthodox
Metropolitan and the converts. Both
events (one from 1485 and one from 1704) shared an important feature: the
taking away of land from the Cetinje Monastery, and the popular memory equated
the two groups, characterizing them as traitors.
The fight over property between the ruler and the Medojevics, its aftermath
and the Metropolitan’s curse in particular resonated strongly in the
popular imagination, and the story was remembered and retold as an example
of a traumatic event. During the first half of the nineteenth century, this
event entered literature and was refurbished with significant new meanings.
The Medojevics became the Turks and
the property dispute, as well as the expulsion of this family from Cetinje,
entered the realm of national mythology as the grand theme of the killing
of converts.

It is indicative that there are no written sources related to the killing
of converts dated before the early nineteenth century. The first mention
of this ultimate crime appears in
a poem by the Montenegrin ruler, the Metropolitan Petar I, which was published
in 1833. Njegos’s teacher and mentor, Sima Milutinovic Sarajlija, used
this motifin his History
of Montenegro because he thought it necessary to add significance to
the role of the Petrovic dynasty in the history of Montenegro. Njegos adopted
the motif and began developing it in his early works.[18]
Finally, in The Mountain Wreath,
and in accordance to the ideology of his time, Njegos elevated this incident,
preserved in the popular memory and reshaped by it, to the level of the struggle
for the preservation of Montenegro’s freedom, heritage, and Eastern
Orthodox faith. One can detect a connection between the image of the early
Medojevics as traitors/converts embedded in the popular memory and the characters
of Hadzi-Ali Medovic Kadija and Skender-Beg Medovic in Njegos’s
The Mountain Wreath.

Available sources point out that Njegos did not base his poem on a historical
event. However, he realized the potential significance of a reshaped myth
and through poetic licenseactualized
its meanings. The myth of the slaying of
converts, as an act of cleansing and the indication of a fresh start,
fitted nicely with Njegos’s efforts to turn Montenegro into a modern
state. With this in mind, I would like to propose yet another way of reading
The Mountain Wreath – the reading
of an epic poem about a NewBeginning.
All myths about a NewBeginning
are variations of a story in which horrible crimes are committed, especially
the killing of innocents and the killing of relatives. Very often it is the
story of twin brothers, a dramatic setting where blood relations make the
crime almost unimaginable and therefore highly symbolic. The initial crime
committed in Montenegro, the crime that signifies its birth, is the extinction
of brothers. It is a civil war. The Beginning
is Tragedy. It is the destruction
of everything that is and the collapse of the fundamental taboos that regulate
the life of an individual and a society. It is the final departure from a
past way of life and its radical alteration.

In the Beginning is the crime of
all crimes, a crime for which there is no justification since it denounces
all accepted values and modes of life. After such a crime, only two solutions
are left: the death of the guilty or the construction of an entirely new identity,
something so new that the process will last as long as is necessary for the
guilty to repent or be erased all together. It seems to me that what Njegos
– the politician – was trying to accomplish was precisely this:
the homogenization of Montenegrin tribes in accordance with the concept of
national awakening, the restructuring of a tribal society into a nation. In
other words: the construction of a new identity. Such a process is painful
and calls for sacrifices. But that was the essence of Njegos’s politics:
to destroy the Old (tribal) Montenegro and create a modern state. He was destroying
it because it was impossible to reform the tribal heroic society in which
he lived. Because of the scope of the crime one can only seek forgiveness
in extremes: to succeed in the attempt, or to perish forever. Both Njegos
and the Metropolitan Danilo from the poem seem painfully aware of the terrible
choice but opt for violence as the
only way to recreate their being
in a new environment.

The Mountain Wreath is an important
literary achievement, and it should be analyzed as a drama that confronts
and challenges the concepts of thought
and action, morality
and righteousness, religion
and human nature, and not as the
poeticized version of a historical event. It is a poetic tale written by a
man who continuously deconstructs and questions the very world he lives in.
Moreover, the character of Njegos’s work is far from one-dimensional
and cannot, in good consciousness, be viewed exclusively as national
literature because it deals with issues much broader than the narrow
margins of Montenegrin political and cultural space. Furthermore, The
Mountain Wreath should not be read outside the context of the time
of its inception, nor from the perspective of one
book. As Danilo Kis has pointed out: “Many
books are not dangerous, but one book is.”[20]

Notes

[1] Regarding the faith of the original manuscript of The
Mountain Wreath and the differences between the first edition and the
original manuscript see: Jevto Milovic, Rukopis
Gorskog Vijenca, Titograd:
CANU, 1982.

[14] The term Hajduk (Haiduk)
has a complex structure whose semantics have varied in time and depended on
constantly shifting power relations in the Balkans. During the Ottoman rule
in the region, Hajduks were “...individuals accused of crimes or protesting
injustice,” which would then “characteristically head for the
hills or forests to live the life of the the haiduk, or outlaw. Both of these
forms of resistance increased from the 17th century...” (The
New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 14, 1998: 675). Morton Benson defined
them as “anti-Turkish highwayman,” while the Enciklopedija
Jugoslavije states that Hajducija
(living the life of Hajduks) “...during the Turkish period it had the
form and character of highway-robbery...” (see: Morton Benson, Srpskohrvatsko-Engleski
Recnik, Drugo preradjeno i dopunjeno izdanje, Beograd: Prosveta, 1982
and Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, Vol.
3. Zagreb, MCMLVIII, Leksikogrfaski Zavod FNRY, 652-54). Among the South Slavs
(Serbs and Montenegrin in particular) this activity acquired additional meanings
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and became viewed as
a form of social unrest and national/political struggle against Ottoman rule.
In Montenegro, such resistance (Hajducija)
also represented a form of war economy because small bands of Hajduks
often looted estates of neighbouring Muslim landowners. Hajduks
in Serbia and Montenegro played a different role in their respective societies,
and their motives for “heading for the hills” were different from
those of haidus in fifteenth and
sixteenth century Hungary. The New Encyclopaedia
Britannica tells us that haidus
were “...Magyar and Slav foot soldiers (hajdus) who fought for Istvan
(Stephen) Bocskay (1557-1606), prince of Transylvania. This militarized population
called haiduk (“brigand”
or “bandit”) by the Turks, were granted lands, privileges and
title exemptions by Bocskay” (The
New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 5. Micropaedia, 1998: 624).